FriendlyELEC News - Page 13 of 16 - CNX Software

October 30, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

NanoPi Duo Quick Start Guide – Ubuntu, Breadboard, Mini Shield & mSATA SSD

As far as I know NanoPi Duo is the only quad core ARM Linux development board that can fit on a breadboard. We’ve already seen it’s much smaller than Raspberry Pi Zero, and the company offer a mini shield exposing USB ports, Ethernet, a few I/Os, and an mSATA slot in in NanoPi Duo Starter Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly. I’ve finally played with it this week-end, and will report what I had to do to blink a LED when connected to breadboard, and my experience using the mini shield with an mSATA SSD, WiFi connectivity, and cooling under load. Flashing Ubuntu 16.04.2 firmware image to NanoPi Duo As with many other Allwinner development boards, you should first check if Armbian is available for the board. NanoPi Duo is not supported, but it’s said to work with Orange Pi Zero image minus support for WiFi. Since the […]

October 30, 2017November 1, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 179 Comments

Giveaway Week – NanoPi NEO NAS Kit with NEO 2 Board

Time has come to organize another giveaway week. I used to mainly give away TV boxes, but due to recent regulations that will not be possible anymore, and instead this giveaway week will include Linux and IoT development boards, and other accessories. I’ll start with NanoPi NEO NAS Kit v1.2. NanoPi NEO NAS Kit v1.2 is a low cost kit NanoPi NEO or NEO 2 board that takes a 2.5″ hard drive. I’ve tested it with NanoPi NEO 2 board and OpenMediaVault, and found to perform optimally for this type of device (USB 2.0 to SATA), with SAMBA reads & writes achieving 40 MB/s. The hardware given away includes the NAS Kit v1.2 and a NanoPi NEO 2 board. You’ll just need to add a micro SD card with the OMV image, a hard drive, and a 12V/2A (or greater) power supply. To enter the draw simply leave a comment […]

September 25, 2017November 3, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments

NanoPi Duo Starter Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly

NanoPi Duo is an inexpensive Allwinner H2+ quad core board with 256MB or 512MB RAM that can fit into a breadboard, and FriendELEC also provides a starter kit with a carrier board, heatsink, enclosure, USB debug board and cable, as well as optional accessories such as an half-length SSD drive. The company sent me two kits for review, so I’ll first check out what I got, and show how to assemble the kit, before actually playing with the board and kit next month. NanoPi Duo Starter Kit Unboxing I got a bunch of boxes and bubble wraps in the package… … and indeed received two identical kits. Each kit comes with a NanoPi Duo board with soldered headers, a mini Shield for NanoPi Duo, a heatsink and thermal pad set, a micro USB to USB cable, a USB to TTL debug board and cable, and acrylic case, and user manuals […]

August 29, 2017September 25, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 38 Comments

$8 NanoPi Duo is a Tiny Breadboard Compatible Linux Board powered by Allwinner H2+ Quad Core SoC

It’s very easy to find breadboard compatible boards in the market with products based on Espressif chips such as NodeMCU or ESP32 boards, as well as OpenWrt board like Onion Omega2, or LinktIt 7688. However, it’s much more difficult to find powerful quad core boards in this form factor, but that’s exactly what FriendlyELEC has done with their NanoPi Duo board featuring an Allwinner H2+ quad core processor in a form factor slightly smaller than a Raspberry Pi Zero. NanoPi Duo specifications: SoC – Allwinner H2+ quad core Cortex A7 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU @ 600 MHz System Memory – 256 or 512 MB DDR3-1866 SDRAM Storage – micro SD card slot, footprint for SPI flash Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (Allwinner XR819 module) with chip antenna, and u.FL/IPEX connector for external antenna USB – 1x micro USB OTG port Expansion headers – 2x 16-pin breadboard compatible […]

July 19, 2017July 19, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

NanoPi K2 Board Gets Ubuntu Core Firmware Image

FriendlyELEC NanoPi K2 is a board powered by Amlogic S905 processor, just like ODROID-C2 board, so while only the Android image was available at launch, it was expected to also support Ubuntu or other Linux distribution shortly after. This was put in doubt by comments on the company’s forums claiming the board would not get Debian images, and only Android was supported. One alternative would be Armbian, but right now they only have ODROID-C2 images for download, no other Amlogic S905 hardware platform is supported either through stable or experimental builds. One user did manage to run Armbian on K2 with balbes150 help, but I’m not sure what’s the status of those firmware. Balbes150 also have a list of image for Amlogic platform in Github, which may be adapted to most hardware by using your board’s device tree binary (DTB) file. The good news today is that FriendyELEC did not give […]

July 19, 2017September 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

ModBerry Industrial Automation Controllers Leverage Raspberry Pi, FriendlyELEC, and AAEON Boards and Modules

TECHBASE’s ModBerry Linux based industrial controllers have been around since 2014 with their first model being ModBerry 500 powered by a Raspberry Pi compute module. Over the years, the company has kept adding new ModBerry controllers with now an interesting choice of Raspberry Pi 3 board or compute module, FriendlyELEC’s NanoPi M1 Plus board, or Intel Atom x5 based AAEON’s UP board. All programmable automation controllers (PAC) runs Linux 4.0 or greater, with Debian or Ubuntu Core rootfs including ready tools and pre-compiled packs including C/C++, JAVA, SQL, PHP, SSH, and VPN support. The firmware is upgradeable over the air, and the controllers can run the company’s iMod control software and interface with iModCloud cloud computing service for telemetry, remote control and data sharing. Typical uses include C-L-V functions with conversion to collect and transmit data over communication interfaces, logging via iModCloud or a SCADA, and visualization via a web […]

July 3, 2017July 3, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments

$25 NanoPi NEO Plus2 Board Adds 8GB Flash, WiFi & Bluetooth, More RAM, and an extra USB Port

NanoPi NEO 2 board has just got an update with NEO Plus2 board featuring the same Allwinner H5 processor and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, but FriendlyELEC updated the RAM from 512MB to 1GB, added an 8GB eMMC flash, a WiFi & Bluetooth module, and an extra USB port. NanoPi NEO Plus2 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H5 quad core Cortex A53 processor with an ARM Mali-450MP GPU System Memory – 1 GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash (Samsung KLM8G1WEPD-B031) + micro SD card slot Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet (via RTL8211E-VB-CG chip), 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 (via Ampak AP6212A wireless module) USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB port (for power only), 2x USB via headers Expansion headers 24-pin header with I2C, 2x UART, SPI, and GPIOs 12-pin header with 2x USB, IR pin, I2S, and GPIOs 5-pin audio 2.0mm pitch header with microphone and LINE out […]

June 18, 2017June 18, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 81 Comments

NanoPi NEO NAS Kit Review – Assembly, OpenMediaVault Installation & Setup, and Benchmarks

NAS Dock v1.2 for Nano Pi NEO / NEO 2 is, as the name implies, a complete mini NAS kit for 2.5″ drive for NanoPi NEO or NEO 2 board. The NEO 2 board is strongly recommended, since it’s not much more expensive, but should deliver much better results due to its Gigabit Ethernet interface. I’ve received two of those kits together with several other boards & accessories from FriendlyELEC, and today I’ll show how to assemble the kit, configure OpenMediaVault, and run some benchmarks. NAS Kit V1.2 Assembly with NanoPi NEO 2 Board The only extra tool you’ll need is a screwdriver, and potentially a soldering iron as we’ll see further below. The metal box is stuff wih accessories so the first thing is to open one or two sides to take out the content. We have the mainboard, NanoPi NEO back plate, NanoPi NEO 2 back plater, a […]